Agency and the Structure of Party Competition: Alignment, Stability and the Role of Political Elites

Party competition is constrained by socio-demographic factors, identities and value orientations. The study of the adaptation to these constraints is hindered for three main reasons, each of them primarily conceptual in nature. First, the examination of the various constraints is rarely integrated into a comprehensive approach, and therefore we lack even a vocabulary that could allow us to reconstruct the strategies with which parties respond. Second, scholarship gives too little attention to the relationship between temporal stability on the one hand and the positional alignments that link political behavior with socio-demographic characteristics, values and group identity on the other. Third, the study of the agency of political elites is either neglected, or it is done in an ad hoc way. This article identifies various methods by which elites reshape structures, and it links those to a broader framework that allows more comprehensive research connecting political agents and structural constraints in the electoral realm.

The article analyzes the last two decades of East-Central European countries along the principal dimensions of party systems. It also investigates the relation ships among the various attributes of party competition. The authors regard polarization, fragmentation, closure (introduced by Peter Mair) and volatility as principal dimensions of party systems, but they argue that the qualitative characteristics of party relationships are as relevant as these much re search ed standard dimensions. They draw attention and systematically scru tinize questions such as how durable the alliances among parties are, how consequential ideological similarities are in government building, and how many and what kind of ideological camps exist in a given party system. The examination of the data proves that for most of the analyzed period party relations were more crys tallized in Hungary and the Czech Republic than in Slovenia, Estonia, Bulgaria and Latvia, while the other countries of the region were situated between these two groups. With the exception of volatility the analyzed indicators moved rather closely together, indicating that it is legitimate to talk about a syndrome of institutionalization. Since the party elites have relatively little control over volatility, the latter variable is not an integral part of the syndrome.

Through the analysis of Hungarian politics, this article demonstrates how parties become embedded in the social, cognitive and emotive structures of societies. The role of agency in cleavage formation is addressed, with a special emphasis on the mechanism through which political parties structure their environments. Next to the popularization of conflict perceptions and the consolidation of camp identities, the development of a more elaborate and segmented organizational structure is identified as an integral part of the process of cleavage formation. Such a structure enables parties to forge coalitions among previously separate social groupings and combine group interests into packages large enough to overcome institutional thresholds of power. The findings indicate that parties are potentially able to cross cleavage lines, re-structure relations within the party system and create new associations between party preferences, socio-structural categories and attitudes. Furthermore, parties seem to be able to alter the relationships between psychologically rooted attitudes and social categories. The study also shows, however, that deep-seated socio-cultural divides limit the power of agency even in new democracies.

Structure versus culture again: Corporatism and the ‘new politics’ in 16 Western European countries

Abstract. Various authors have hypothesized that corporatist institutional arrangements favor the development of ‘new politics’: new social movements, concern for issues such as peace and ecology, postmaterialist orientation and voting for left-libertarian parties. This article analyzes the relationships between corporatism and ‘new politics’ using Siaroff's (1999) corporatism scores for 16 West European countries and data from Inglehart et al.'s (1998) World Value Survey. The results of the analysis show that corporatism is related to higher membership in peace movements and also to belief in the urgency of ecological problems. However, it is unrelated to postmaterialist values, votes for ‘new parties’, approval of the environmentalist and feminist movements, and willingness to contribute financially to environmental protection. The relationships between corporatism and ‘new politics’ is shown to be somewhat mediated by economic factors, while the hypothesis that postmaterialism is a principal factor behind the popularity of the new social movements is not substantiated.

This article addresses the issue of personality vs. cultural norms with regard to two related problems: the relationship between authoritarianism and prejudice, and the empirical foundation of the concept of ethnocentrism. The analysis is based on a survey of anti-Gypsy attitudes in two Hungarian cities, Salgótarján and Sopron. A random sample of 400 adolescents was surveyed, including one parent of each adolescent (total N = 800). The two locations differ in aggregate level of anti-Gypsy prejudice, that is, the anti-Gypsy cultural norm, which allows the use of a quasi-experimental design. The results support the empirical foundation of the concept of ethnocentrism, although it was possible to detect the effect of cultural pressure on the connection between anti-Gypsy prejudice and general ethnocentrism. Concerning the effect of cultural pressure on the relationship between authoritarianism and anti-Gypsy prejudice, the results support the cultural pressure model in the youth samples, but contradict this model in the parent samples. Multivariate causal modeling of the youth anti-Gypsy prejudice shows that in both cities authoritarianism and parents' prejudice are significant direct predictors. However, the role of authoritarianism is considerably weaker under condition of higher normative pressure.